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In a session at Microsoft’s Convergence conference, an attendee asked the question:
“Why isn’t anyone talking about using CRM instead of ERP for creating and sending quotes? This is an important customer-facing activity in our business and it seems that everyone defaults to doing this in their ERP system.”
It was a great question, and although the speaker didn’t have an immediate answer, a small crowd formed around the person who asked the question at the end. I’m not sure if it was a brainstorming group or a support group. But some of the comments that came out:
These are great questions, and something that we see frequently in the marketplace.
The fact is that most modern CRM systems have quoting and order entry modules, and so do most modern ERP systems. But there are three reasons why businesses still handle quote and order management in ERP: (1) ERP was there first and they don’t want to pay the price to migrate it to CRM, (2) ERP is the 50 year old paradigm for handling quotes and orders, and paradigm shifts are difficult, (3) the product catalog is already managed in ERP and it is easier to work with that rather than to sync it with CRM.
There is also a misperception that CRM solutions are not as powerful as ERP systems when it comes to handling quotes and orders. But this misperception is outdated by a number of years. The reality is that most organizations will have to make customizations to their quote and order-entry processes regardless of which system it is in, so the investment may as well be directed to the best system to get the job done.
So, the primary reasons for managing quotes and orders in ERP? It’s easier to set it up there, and that’s the way we’ve always done it.
So why should companies consider using their customer relationship management system for these functions? Our clients and recent research indicates four compelling, and highly inter-related, reasons to consider a CRM application for quoting and order entry.
The question that a team should ask is: “are we a customer-centric organization, or a process/technology centric organization?” If people come first in your organization, then the decisions you make will be different if process comes first. In fact, more organizations that are choosing a customer-centric approach are moving other customer-facing processes to their CRM system.
If you’re going down the path of migrating this process to CRM, the next question is: when do we make the move? That will certainly vary from one organization to the next. Here are a few rules to live by:
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